A pair of hackers that gained access to the Xbox account of a Treyarch employee believes they've stumbled across the next entry in the Call of Duty series, code named Iron Wolf. Are they on to something?

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The Iron Wolf speculation comes after hackers gained access to the Xbox Live account of an internal PartnerNet gamertag which appears to belong to an employee at Call of Duty developer Treyarch. Flipping through braindx0's friends list, they noticed a number of friends playing a game labeled as Iron Wolf. Their assumption, fueled by the fact that one of the maps being played in Iron Wolf shared a name with a map from Black Ops, is that these people were playing Call of Duty 9, code named Iron Wolf.

The assumption strikes me as highly unlikely. The idea of a group of developers playing an upcoming game on a public network before the previous version has hit the market is ridiculous, especially when the franchise in question is Call of Duty.

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What could they be playing? That requires more speculation. With a map name shared with Call of Duty: Black Ops, they could just be testing tweaks for that game. With the Iron Wolf code name sharing initials with Infinity Ward, they could be playing an early build of Modern Warfare 3, perhaps for comparison to the Wii version of Modern Warfare 3, developed by Treyarch.

And of course, I have to accept the possibility that sure, it could be Call of Duty 9. I'm 90 percent certain it isn't, but I have to allow. The Activision spokesperson I contacted about the story could only give me "Activision does not comment on rumors or speculation," so until they prove otherwise, there's always a chance.